ART/ARCHITECTURE; Marriage Under Glass: Intimate Exposures

By LYLE REXER

Published: November 19, 2000

AT the conclusion of a slide lecture in May at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the photographer Sally Mann asked whether the audience would be interested in seeing some images of work in progress. The audience was eager for such a glimpse and seemed genuinely moved by what it saw. But controversy, like fame, is easier to court than to control.

A few days later, the governor's office announced that it had received an anonymous letter complaining about the presentation, especially the new photos, and it scolded the museum, as a taxpayer-supported institution, for presenting ''displays that push the envelope of decency.'' The museum, recognized for its outstanding collection of modern art and its commitment to presenting the work of Virginia artists, was put on the defensive, and Ms. Mann found herself suddenly, again, in an all too familiar place: at the eye of a cultural storm.

Whatever terms of censure or praise photographs might provoke have already been applied to Ms. Mann's work. In 1992, she exhibited and published some 65 photographs dealing mostly with her three children under the title ''Immediate Family.'' In some of the pictures, the children were naked. The reaction was as immediate as the title. To many people, the photographs' blend of fiction and documentary appeared to be a calculated assault on the last fortress of decency. Heterosexuality and sanctity had fallen to Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, and now childhood innocence was being violated. Among art critics, objections seemed to focus not so much on the myth Ms. Mann had clearly constructed as on her willingness to ''use'' her children as subjects and pose them. Defenders and detractors took their sides, and for better or worse, these images became Ms. Mann's signature and source of celebrity.

Artists tend to find themselves in hot water precisely because they illuminate places most of us prefer to keep comfortably dim. ''Immediate Family'' created a place that looked like Eden (it is actually a river on Ms. Mann's farm in Virginia), then cast upon it the subdued and shifting light of nostalgia, sexuality and death. Her childhood Eden is encircled by a darkness that both comforts and encroaches.

In the late 1990's, however, after the storm had passed, Ms. Mann began to exhibit large-format landscapes of Georgia and Virginia. It seemed that she had left Eden and the family behind to confront in the spectral, luminous hills different intimations of change, loss and timelessness. What sort of images could have caused the current stir in the state house? I asked a museum staffer this question. ''Pictures of her marriage,'' was the reply.

Ms. Mann has been married to Larry Mann for more than 30 years. He is a sculptor and metal worker turned lawyer who practices in and around Lexington, Va., which, if not the cradle of the Confederacy, is surely its grave. Both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are buried there. The Manns live outside town, in a new house they designed on the farm once owned by Ms. Mann's father, a Lexington physician of legendary eccentricity. Two of their three children are in college, their daughter Jessie, 19, at Washington and Lee University in Lexington and their son, Emmett, 21, at Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. Their youngest, Virginia, 15, is in private school. If it weren't for the cow pastures and the Arabian horses the Manns board, the setting might be Italy, with its hill crests and rolling vistas. Just beyond the pastures and into the woods runs the Maury River, where images of ''Immediate Family'' were taken. The farm is a protected place, ''a domain,'' in the words of the artist Cy Twombly, a Lexington native and family friend. His phrase suggests a defensible realm, where you can see trouble coming from a long way off.

Ms. Mann, who is 49, did not see this trouble coming. ''I never expected the new pictures to raise a commotion,'' she says, ''and I was very distressed that the presentation caused anguish for the museum, which is a wonderful treasure. I have presented the slide show half a dozen times and never had a complaint. Quite the opposite. People have come up and said, 'I had doubts about your work, but now I see what you're trying to do.' I do believe if I could bring everyone here to see how these pictures grow out of a place and the people around me, if I could put the pictures of my marriage in context, even the most rigid Puritan would give them the benefit of the doubt.''

At first glance, these new pictures seem almost too casual to present to an audience. Ms. Mann calls them ''inchoate'' and has no immediate plans to exhibit them in a gallery setting. Unlike the composed icons of ''Immediate Family,'' they seem as quotidian as snapshots, full of unremarked things that make up the creaturely content of our days: the water of a bathroom shower, the light of an afternoon through a bedroom window. They are also unflinchingly confidential. Ms. Mann began to take pictures of her herself and her husband as early as the 1970's, and she has built a voluminous chronicle of their life together. Nothing about the physical facts of existence is edited out: menstruation, bathing, lovemaking, repose, moments of vacancy and ecstasy. ''It's a record of intimacy and quietude,'' says Ms. Mann.